ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 2: Taste
Taste
[A lecture delivered at Clemson University November 2015]
For much of human history plants breeders had the determinative say in what the basic flavors were of what humans and animals ate. For two generations flavor technicians at industrial food processing companies have usurped the role of arbiter of the flavor of the material we ingest. I am one of those interested in maintaining flavor as one of the most significant concerns of breeding aesthetics.
I was invited here to say something about taste—its history—its cultural function—its implications for the preservation and creation of plant varieties. Taste has at various times in recently history had more or less importance in the aesthetics of plant breeding. But for the last quarter century what was once an ancillary concern has become central. Chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in the 1970s commenced a reorientation of fine dining around superlative vegetables. She inspired a rising generation of chefs who began to inquire seriously about the flavor of different varieties of vegetables—root vegetables, greens.
On a second front biologists, anthropologists and physiologists began exploring the role of taste in determining nutrition in one’s environment. From the insect to the primate taste enable a creature to recognize not only what was edible, but what was nutritious in the landscape. Chemicals in organic matter and certain minerals trigger receptors in the creature seeking nutrition. If taste has such a universal function in sustaining the welfare of living things, then why does it not stand at the center of the effort to shape the crops that feed the livestock and human consumers?
Finally there is the exploration of taste by Flavor Chemists, scientists interested in the analysis of make up of the myriad of aromas and flavors that occur naturally in foods—in a mint leaf for instance—explore the isolated chemicals and ponder the synthetic means of products that will attract buyers. The work that these persons do is fascinating and complex, and enable a wide variety of things: the creation of denture cleaners whose residual taste will make people willing to put them back in one’s motht again after a washing, or children’s vitamins. Perhaps we best know their work in terms of the effort to create artificial sweeteners, or the creation of snack foods, candies, sodas, and other processed foods. Flavor Chemists are the masters of extrinsic, while the greatest breeders of fruits and vegetables are masters of the intrinsic—I think about someone like the brilliant USDA berry breeder of the early 20th century George Durrow, or the tremendous work now being done with apples, or the Rodgers Brothers of Idaho, who launched Silver Queen Corn in 1958.
Silver Queen Corn puts me in mind of one of the questions that hovers around taste history. Is the recent history of taste as it bears on processing and the market one governed by excess and crudity? Mark Schatzker in his 2015 book The Dorito effect chronicled per capita spice consumption has risen 500 percent in the past century. He posed a question: Has the American mouth become hijacked by the ‘more is better’ principle—more sweet, more hot, more spicy, more salty, more fat, more sour. The sweet corn varieties—the sugary extender, and the super sweet varieties—all boast substantially more sugar than the famous Silver Queen—and can keep it stable for longer periods of time—up to 10 days in the case of one cultivar. Here the breeders are competing head to head with the flavor technicians of American food processing industry, trying to make it more. And so we saw a dozen ultra sweet corn varieties, with one or two: Argent—How Sweet it Is—being superlative creations—albeit sold under the name Silver Queen as often as not—and the majority of them of them boasting skins on the kernels as tough as the hide of a muscadine. Others are too cloying.
Flavor scientist Howard Moskowitz showed in the 1970s there are thresholds—the bliss point--beyond which increasing sweetness, or saltiness, or spiciness diminishes. Yet the food processors and some vegetable breeders ignore that point of diminishing return. And the question is, has constant exposure to saltier, sweeter, fattier, spicier foods pushed that bliss point to a more extreme threshold? Are the mass of consumers losing a capacity to sense subtlety?
In resistance to this trend towad Xtreme flavors and “more is better” that chefs a generation ago began following Alice Waters exploration of the intrinsic tastes of vegetables. Movements such as Slow Food began to question the wisdom of chemically synthecising 1000 Banana flavors (the boast of the Illinois based Synergy flavors), --bananas foster, green banana, and caramelized banana (not referencing the taste spectrum of current or historic banana varieties.
Some flavor companies, using distillates, have long performed an important role in classical food and beverage processing. Others are simply taking an artificial taste flavor and ringing the changes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami at various intensities.
I confess I am not one to dismiss the free play of chemical experimenters out of hand; there is always the possibility that some novel combination of molecules with activate something novel and profound. Yet I am all too aware of the role that taste has had in the evolution of animal’s search for sustenance.
SOME DEEP HISTORY
For omnivores foraging and hunting for sustenance, sorting the good from the bad, the palatable from the poisonous, is of the utmost importance for survival. Paleo anthropologists surmise a starvation-impelled experimentalism; and they suppose that human gut bacteria was much more potent then than now—like a turkey vultures perhaps—capable of digesting rotting meat.
Alexander von Humboldt suggests how extraordinarily developed the senses of taste and smell were among hunter gatherers. Wandering the foothills of the Andes in the 1840s with a band of Natives, Humbold noted that they could discriminate the 16 dominant trees in their forest by taste alone.
When humans domesticated wild plants—by keeping and planting the seeds of those that tasted best and those that grew the largest or earliest fruits, grains, or corms—diet became fixed to agriculture. Consumption became substantially more intensive—concerned with fewer foods—a handful of plants supplemented by hunting, fishing, and foraging. Eating became intensive—less extensive.
When you eat the same things every day, the taste of these staples has to be extraordinarily agreeable. Wholesomeness of flavor becomes of more enduring importance than pronounced flavor. Because grains reproduce sexually and have a kind of genetic dynamism to them, never standing still, the growers who selected and saved seed chose what seemed most agreeable, healthful, digestible, and repeatable. Certain of these ancient grasses assumed marked family resemblance in morphology, growth pattern, and taste. These distinct strains developed over time by generations of cultivators are now known as landraces.
It is difficult to ascertain how intimate these feedback loups were between grower and the grain. If the field were manured with night soil—cured human excrement—human gut flora was inflecting the microbial population of the soil, and was participating in the plant’s upload of nutriment from the soil.
The cultures that developed the ancient landraces did not have writing. But as the Meso-American improvement of teosinte in maize demonstrates, the knowledge and ingenuity of these ancient gardeners was often breathtaking. The surviving landraces themselves are books of ancient agricultural knowledge.
How ancient: hundreds of human generations and thousands of plant generations are expressed in the various strains. Their flavors formed the fundamental chords of world cuisines—the porridges, breads, and beverages. Even in the 21st century world cultures have kept these grain porridges as a component of the first meal of the day—the rice conji—oatmeal-hominy grits—cream of wheat or firmity as it was once known.
Yet a rupture in the history of taste occured during the early modern period, in the 16th century. World exploration caused a wave of novelty to sweep through world cultures. the pursuit of wholesomeness in ingredients by plant breeders was supplanted in the early modern period by the pursuit of taste sensation by consumers.
Wolfgang Schivelbush in his classic study, The Tastes of Paradise, indicated that what drove the first world trade system were drugs—plants and substances that provoked bodily response—sugar, spice, chocolate, capsicum, tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. The effects of these substances could be addictive. They were not necessary for nourishment, but they fooled the body into a craving. Their taste and effects were intense—unlike the modulate flavor of the long-developed land race grains. Indeed from their introduction they trumped the old substantial tastes.
For the last four centuries the market for the paradisiac sweetness, hotness, saltiness, fattiness, or stimulation (caffeine) has driven food consumption—and the demand has influenced what has been grown. The five sorts of taste sensors were activated by different of these global products. Bitter (the most problematic of taste biologically since there is great genetic difference in the population to bitter chemicals) became the signature of the stimulents: of coffee, tea, and chocolate—and as physician’s manuals dictated, they were ‘dulcified’ when consumed by the addition of sweet (honey or sugar) and milk or cream.
Heat is not registered by the taste mechanisms of the body at all, but by one’s pain sensing system. It’s capacity to jolt the body into perspiration, and its capacity to stimulate a whole body physical response and then an endorphin release made it one of the simplest of the world drugs to experience and understand. Perhaps with no other taste is the pursuit of more without regard to the taste of food is more starkly visible. From the ghost pepper to the Carolina Reaper, breeders have been pushing the Scovill numbers higher and higher.
The spread of sweetness has been a function of the price of sugar. When the plantations of Brazil in the 16th century made supply available in Europe, haute cuisine invented confectionery as a category and sugar baking as a craft. When cold tolerant purple ribbon cane made loaf white sugar cheap in the United States during the 1820s, jellies, preserves, homemade fruit wines, and mass candies sprang into being. When sugar beets made sugar even cheaper in the 1880s, the dental profession exploded in America. Indeed it was against this wave of saccharine that the cereal purists—The Kellogg Brothers and Post—of the physical culture movement led their surprisingly successful crusade. But after the death of the last of the Kelloggs at age 96 in 1951, his successors converted corn flakes into sugar frosted flakes in 1952, and the drenching of grain with sugar became industry practice, except for a handful of ‘healthy’ breakfast foods. Since then we have had the curious spectacle of attempts to mimic the taste of sugar without the caloric power.
One looks to the citrus industry for a register of the intensification of sour. IOne looks to the explosion in growth of lemon and lime in groves. One looks to the output gains in all citrus varieites—in Florida 10 million box in 1915, 100 million in 1950, 200 million in 1971. And one looks to the breeding trends that gave rise to California Sour, and Sour Lemon OG. And maybe one looks to the recent tendency to pick fruit immature before all the sugar develops. The brewing industry is another register of the sour fascination.
The simplification and intensification of the 5 tastes & the heat led historically in the 20th century to some curious developments in fruit and berry consumption and growing. Except in several ethnic communities, the general craving for fruit that combined both sweet and sour declined. The old nursery catalogues classified such fruit as ‘subacid.” the entire class of sweet-sour strawberries (the Hoffman, the Klondike, and to a lesser extent the Blakemore) favored in the South from the 1850s to 1930s and sweet-sour cherries (the Duke category) disappeared by the mid 20th century. The Duke Cherries were once ubiquitous—the May Duke, the Hoke, the Arch Duke.
I was put in mind of this curiosity of American taste history recently in New Orleans at Carmo, the restaurant run by Dana Honn & Christina Honn specializing in tropical cuisine. Dana offered a series of juices made from tropical fruits including the soursop (Annona muricata), a fruit greatly popular in the West Indies, Central & the northern part of South America. For a period of time in the late 19th century Florida orchardists grew the fruit as a speculative venture. As I guzzled the cup I realized that I had never had a fruit or juice with this complex of flavors. It was truly new and truly strange. I like it, but . . . Can one be habituated in to thinking that a flavor is somehow wrong, or some kind of category screw up? Had America's penchant to distinguish sweet from sour in most fruit influenced my taste sensibility. I kept coming back to the whitish juice, testing it time and again to see if the sour and the sweet belonged together, worked in dialogue. I'm afraid one sipping session did not answer the question.
I wondered too whether the U.S. would more readily embrace the soursop's sweet cousin, the Sugar Apple, a plant that at one time was found in deep South gardens under the name 'Custard Apple.'
But it did seriously prod me to consider the potentials of reviving plants once greatly popular int he United States that posed the same paradoxes for the tongue. We’ve seen the revival of the Montmorency Cherry, a sour variety, in Michigan in the 21st century because of its interestingly complex way of presenting sourness If I were to undertake any sort of large scale pomological project at this juncture offering once again the cherry golden mean between the sweet Bing or the Sour Morello is where I would start. Rebooting an entire category of cherry flavor has the kind of attention grabbing force that would seize popular attention as well as that of culinary professionals. I would not limit such a restoration to the revival of the half dozen old varieties—this category is one that cries out for the creative sort of breeding that has gone on in the apple world since the debut of the Honey Crisp.
I won’t discourse on salt or umami/fat, because their bearing on vegetable, fruit, and grain breeding are limited—except perhaps for the unusual case of the avocado.
Perhaps the most surprising insight of food modernism is David Wesson’s 1880’s conclusion that foods having tastelessness had as great or even greater potential for mass adoption than the ‘tastes of paradise,’ for if an edible has no taste, there is no grounds for objecting to the taste—no disgust.
With the rise of industrial food processing the creators of new processed foods began crafting foods that had a neutral or relatively tasteless nutritive dimension with a superadded taste or tastes of paradise. In certain respects the history of the breakfast cereal from the wholesome plain grains that Kellogg and Post introduced in the 1890s as a part of their campaign for nutrition of pure food to the late 20th century concocted cereals such as Count Chocula and Fruit Loops epitomize the pattern of history.
It has been the conviction of a small group of people that the agricultural and horticultural wisdom of the world’s cultures should not vanish. Every landrace that survives should be preserved and we should study their tastes and qualities with the sharpest acuity.
While a landrace such as purple straw wheat may not possess the desired harvestables (disease resistance, grain size, extensive tillering, and efficiency in converting petroleum based fertilizer into leaf and grain) that agronomists now favor, its employment over many centuries—including its use in the South from the colonial era to the 1970s—bespeaks something of value. Its taste and its qualities made it the standard biscuit, cake and whiskey wheat for much of southern history. Its enduring attractiveness, its suitability, its wholesome flavor should be something we study, preserve, encourage, and perhaps reincorporate in new breeds of wheat suited to our region. And the landrace and its taste should be kept alive into to future as a reference, and because the culinary and agricultural wisdom for many generations of growers, bakers, and distillers has shaped it.